People are basically good. It’s a truism drilled into us by any number of self-help books, magazines, talk-show hosts, and pop-therapy. When, from time to time, the wheels come off and people do terrible things to each other or themselves, we are assured that just the right combination of education, medication, and therapy can correct the ignorance, illness, or faulty social conditioning that led to the act. But do we really believe it? Do we think it’s true? Or, do we recognize there something more sinister is at work in human nature?

By profession, I’m a Christian theologian and I often have conversations in which these questions arise. They are made very difficult by the loss of vocabulary that has traditionally helped people like me to get at the problem. In the past, Christians across confessions could use words like sin, evil, and even the language of the demonic and assume a broad cultural context that would make those words understandable to all involved. No more. Even in very socially and theologically conservative Christian churches the language of therapy has replaced the language of sin. Since Karl Meninger’s 1973 exposé of the trend in his now classic, Whatever Became of Sin? the problem has only intensified.

So let’s ask Meninger’s follow-up question: what ought to be done about it? If, as I suspect, there’s something askew in the notion that people are basically good, how do we say so if the language of sin is lost? It’s hard for a theologian to admit what I’m about to do. But here goes. It seems to me that paying close attention to some of Hollywood’s best films could re-teach us the traditional, rich, and incisive language that Christian cultures have used to describe the human condition. Hollywood can teach us how to speak about sin—and indeed how to be sinners again.

The obvious place to start is with Heath Ledger’s interpretation of The Joker in The Dark Knight. The Joker is, as he says, chaos. There is no greater good, no twisted virtue, no dysfunctional childhood or genetic malady that can explain the Joker. He can be described. But not explained. Precisely because explanation requires order and The Joker is about chaos. He is a pristine example of a human being completely given over to the demonic. “Some people,” says Alfred, “just want to watch the world burn.”

Sadly, Ledger’s powerful performance threatens to overpower what the other villain in the story has to say to us. Harvey Dent/Two Face encapsulates the fears of many that the law that grounds and maintains our civil society is ultimately capricious, in the end, subject to the whims of chance. Lawlessness, under a thin veneer of social respectability, is real the real bedrock of human life.

“There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those to weak to seek it.” The words could well have come from The Joker, Two Face, even Batman himself in his darker moments. They come from another Hollywood villain, however: Lord Voldemort. In J.K. Rowling’s world, the mark of a Death Eater—a follower of He Who Must Not Be Named—is the refusal to recognize or to be bound by any moral categories while the true hero is one who recognizes the powerful temptation that such a worldview offers, and resists it, opting instead for the path of love and self-sacrifice embodied in Harry Potter’s mother. To be sure, the line separating the two is often difficult to discern. If Severus Snape teaches us anything, it is that appearances are often deceiving because the line separating good from evil runs not between human beings, but through them.

This is another of Rowling’s themes that has easily been transposed to the screen. Good and evil are viable moral categories, but in real life, it’s nearly impossible to sometimes separate the two. Professor Quirrell—the bumbling, good natured Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher—is actually a servant of the Dark Lord. Delores Umbridge, not too subtly modeled after Baroness Thatcher and a temporary Headmistress of Hogwarts, shows how vicious evil can lurk behind the banal and the bureaucratic. Hagrid, the lumbering giant suspect because of his race, is a faithful and loyal friend. Sirius Black, so long a figure of contempt, is at once noble and too irreparably damaged to be Harry’s father figure.

Still, such complications ought not mask the fact that for Rowling as for Christopher Noland, the real world is a world of virtue and vice. A world of sinners and saints and scores of people somewhere in between. It is a world that cannot be accurately captured by the therapeutic, a world that gives the lie to the notion that people are basically good.

These are admittedly extreme examples. Very few (though, tragically, not few enough) human beings will ever give themselves over to evil to the degree that they will be consumed by it, becoming their own Joker or Two Face or Voldemort. Snape, Quirrell and Umbridge may well be nearer the mark for most of us. Hollywood has other sinners who are more complex, more familiar, and therefore all the more frightening—to me at least. These are sinners who sin precisely because they have been corrupted through virtue.

To be truly wicked, C. S. Lewis said one must have at least one virtue to make one great. However counterintuitive that notion might seem to be at first glance, Hollywood again gives us multiple examples that demonstrate its truth. Think about Saruman as played by Christopher Lee in The Lord of the Rings. (Set aside for the sake of argument the fact that he’s not a human being, but an angel). So driven is he to rid Middle Earth of Sauron—the very same good vocation as that of Gandalf—that he is consumed by it. Through his courage, insight, and determination, Saruman becomes at once Sauron’s ally and rival as he is devoured by the power the Ring. Lewis’ friend and fellow Inkling, J. R. R. Tolkien has it right: studying the Enemy’s methods too much will, whatever the original noble motivation, reproduce him in us.

Or how about Ian McKellen’s Magneto in the X-Men films? Here is a man driven by a quest for justice for those like him. He has survived the Holocaust and various other expressions of human evil on a grand scale and has concluded that justice for mutants will not be found in Charles Xavier’s naïve dream of co-existence between mutant and human. If the mutants are to thrive, they must rule. And so desperate is their situation that they must come to rule by whatever means necessary. Of course, by “whatever means necessary” grants Magneto the permission to do exactly to humans (and in fact, to other mutants) that which he claims to abhor.  “He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process.” Good advice from Friedrich Nietzsche, advice Magneto has failed to heed.

My favorite and final example is Michael Corleone, the one Corleone son destined not to go into the family business in The Godfather. “Just lie here Pop. I’m with you now. I’m with you,” says Michael to his father Vito as the old Don recovers from a failed assassination attempt. I have never seen a more moving scene of a son’s love for his father on the big screen. And in that moment, that is so rich in compassion, Michael refuses his destiny and embraces the family business. It is his love for his father and his family, his courage, and his unswerving loyalty that turn him into a ruthless killer, into the next Godfather. As Godfather II closes, Michael has expanded and consolidated his power. We last see him sitting alone in his boathouse. The one thing he loved most—his family—has been destroyed by his own evil, his own twisted sense of family honor. His brother, Fredo, is dead at his command. His wife, Kate has left him. “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” asked Jesus. Too late, Michael Corleone knows the answer.

Are people basically good? No matter how much and in how many ways we tell ourselves that this is so, it seems we remain suspicious. It just doesn’t square with the world as we experience it. Our doubts find expression not in our churches, but in the stories we tell ourselves at the multiplex. Deep down, most people still know we live in a world where The Joker and Voldemort haunt our nightmares while combinations of Magneto, Saruman, and Michael Corleone run alongside us, and if we’re honest with ourselves, within us. And the only language that does justice to this condition is the language of sin. Human beings are sinners. That’s the bad news. The good news is, only sinners can be saved.

I’m surprised no one has taken issue with my contention that St. Thomas’s theological and philosophical genius lay in part in its de-coupling God from creation, such that creation could be encountered and explained without direct reference to the divine. After all, did not Thomas give us the 5 Ways? And do these not explicitly argue for the existence of God in terms of Cause (God) and Effect (the Universe)?

Well, just in case anyone was wondering, here’s my thought. . . . (By the way, I don’t offer this as in any way a scholar of Thomas and so welcome engagement by any  who think I am mistaken).

St. Thomas Aquinas’  five ways are often considered to be arguments for the existence of God and they can and often do function as such in philosophy of religion. Sometimes these arguments fare quite well; other times, they do not. Contra Richard Dawkins—who dismisses a barely undergraduate-level caricature of Aquinas’ arguments in three pages—and with Keith Ward—who ably dispenses with the dismissal in a slightly longer chapter—I am inclined to agree that the five ways can be re-articulated to modern audiences. In the light of the findings of modern science the five ways rightly understood continue to provide compelling, if not conclusive, reasons to believe that the existence of God is almost certain. To stay here, at the level of scepticism, however, is, I think to miss the real point that Thomas was making 800 years ago. A point that remains valid for our discussion.

Pace both Dawkins and Ward, I am not so sure that arguing for the existence of God was precisely what St. Thomas was up to when he set forth the five ways in the third article of the second question of the Summa Theologiae. What then does St. Thomas mean when he says that there are five ways in which the existence of God can be proved? To work toward an answer, it is important to keep in mind that St. Thomas is not arguing with atheists. He is not a modern-out-of-time. Thomas’ contention lies with other believers who thought either that God’s existence was self-evident (this is Anselm’s ontological argument), or that God’s existence could not be determined through examination of the natural world and was instead a matter to be accepted entirely on faith (Aquinas cites St. John of Damascus here). Thomas is arguing against fellow believers, wanting to show in his five ways that we can arrive at God from close observation of the world around us. Awareness of God’s existence is not a matter of mere definition—existence is not a predicate; nor is it simply to be taken on faith. Awareness of God’s existence inevitably emerges through a close investigation of the world God has made.

This, I think, gets us much closer to Thomas’ real point. While there is a claim being made about the demonstrability of God’s existence (though it is not quite a precursor of the theist/atheist debate), there is (and this is much more important for my purposes) a claim being made about the nature of humanity. Namely, that our minds are so ordered toward the natural world that, as we attend to it closely, we will be led almost hook-in-nose to consider what lies beyond it, to what we cannot observe, to that which transcends sensory perception. We cannot help but operate in this way, says Thomas. It simply is part of who we are. In arguing thus, Thomas initiates a revolution in Christian thought by arguing that the road to God lies in turning toward the natural world rather than away from it. Indeed, it is the decisive turn away from Neo-Platonic Augustinianism to Aristotle’s empiricism and materialism that, when coupled with a Christian doctrine of creation, laid the philosophical and theological groundwork for the emergence of the natural sciences in Europe (and not elsewhere).

I don’t want to look at the particulars of the 5 ways. I want to focus on how this turn to the natural world works itself out. When we observe the world, Thomas says, its intricacy, order and almost inherent sense of purpose invites questions about intent and design. What ordered the universe? What imbued its consciousless creatures with meaning? The answer is that which Christians call God (the first way). Further investigation reveals that the universe is composed of an intricate connection of causes and effects. And this recognition invites yet more questions, this time about the universe’s formal, efficient, material and final causation (the remaining four ways). Who conceived of the universe, brought it into being, provided the matter for its construction, and toward whom it is directed? Again, the answer to these questions is what Christians call God.

Even though this is the briefest summary of the five ways, I hope I have expressed them accurately and clarified my point. St. Thomas thinks that human beings are naturally oriented to know both the natural world and, in and through the pursuit of that knowledge, to seek after its ultimate source, the transcendent, what he names as God. In turning us away from Neo-Platonic and Augustinian inwardness and illumination to empirical investigation, Thomas is not attempting to prove God’s existence to a medieval atheist (as there were none). Rather, he is providing a large conceptual map for questions he believes to be universal. Questions to which he can go provide distinctly Christian answers, as he does in the rest of the Summa. This is, of course, exactly what is to be expected from a member of the Order of Preachers, given that their mission is evangelism through teaching and preaching.

If I am reading Thomas correctly, he thus gives the world intelligibility in its own right–it can be accounted for in terms of itself–and explains why humans are hardwired to allow this intelligibility to provoke different sorts of questions. Thus, to say theories of the universe don’t need a creator in order to be true is-to me–entirely proper and is perfectly compatible with believing in God without resort to fideism.

Am I on the right track here?